ABSTRACT
I must confess; I work with data. I love data. Interview data. Survey data. Journal entries. Fieldnotes. Statistics. Discourse analysis. Testimony. Documents. Analytic memos. Evidence. There is no data that I don’t love, including my own dataletters to my mother, notes about my children’s language development, textbooks from high school that I marked up, class and course notes, emails sent and received, reviewers’ comments on my manuscripts, notices of successes and failures. I love collecting data. I love planning to collect data. I love reviewing data, analyzing data, marking data with colored pens, choosing data, CREATING data. I love storing data in plastic boxes in my office, and stroking the boxes when I feel in need of inspiration. I write nothing without data, except possibly thank-you notes.
